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I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, a

I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.

Bartweiss 7y ago
Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting. We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's time (plus interrupt them). Adding an hour of prep and summary for the caller lowers that ratio a bit so everyone has a more similar view of the meeting. That's rarely grounds to make things harder with no benefit, but meeting prep has very solid benefits. Even in terms of time wasted, a clear agenda keeps meetings from dragging on, and routing minutes/summary after the fact avoids repeating discussions or inviting people who only need to listen.
- papito 7y ago
  Adding a barrier of entry to something generally improves the quality of whatever it is.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    At the cost of quantity, but agreed. (There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.) Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing. So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.
    - caro_douglos 7y ago
      might charging a ‘call to meeting’ fee based on the attendees salary/hourly rate be an alternative?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I would be very concerned about that killing productivity by making it so that nobody is willing to schedule them at all.
      - triceratops 7y ago
        Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.
        eitland 7y ago
        I'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it: Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.
        memling 7y ago
        in contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this. As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that. Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
- naravara 7y ago
  >We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    I can't believe I've never thought of it in physical terms before! This is perfect! I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way. At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake. Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
- larrik 7y ago
  I see it as putting more of the cost of the meeting onto the caller, rather than spreading it amongst the participants via wasted time and energy (or the dreaded re-convene since no one was ready).
  - labawi 7y ago
    It's not just shifting costs. Maybe you trade say 1-3 units of time of caller for say 9x 1 units of time of attendees, for a 9/3 = 3x or more savings. Callers tend to have higher salary, but usually way less than the people count multiplier.
Tobani 7y ago
John Cleese taught us that in the 70's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetings,_Bloody_Meetings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetings,_Bloody_Meetings
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Back then information was disseminated via inter-office memos and meetings. They were more valuable for general communication than today.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Agreed but it also applies to standups. I think if you just want ambient awareness, have people post their daily "what I did/will do" to Slack. No need to derail every single day for half an hour or more.
- na85 7y ago
  I find 15-minute, daily "sync meetings" to be an invaluable tool in coordinating the efforts of an organization with many moving parts. The meeting chair (senior engineer) goes around the room and we all have the same list of items to report on each day. It helps avoid duplication of effort and also increases coordination in pursuit of objectives.
- flatline 7y ago
  Half an hour or more is no longer a standup.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup". More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.
    - username90 7y ago
      > standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes: > The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100 https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...
Jd 7y ago
Ever since I started ending time budgeting for each agenda item I've never looked back. My agendas look like this: (1) Two word emotional check in [Lead:Jd][budget: 5 minutes, actual: ] (2) How did sprint one go? [Lead:Mark][budget: 7 minutes, actual: ] (3) Should we have pizza or chinese food for lunch? [Lead:Francis][budget: 3 minutes, actual: ] I send out the agendas in advance for anyone to PM me to add something. Then I use a stop timer to track how many minutes were used per agenda and send it along with the minute meetings and action items post-meetings. Action items are almost always tracked some sort of issue tracker but I use different ones for different projects.
naravara 7y ago
Not just an agenda but, if possible, an explanation for why each invitee is being invited and what they are expected to bring to the table. I can't count the number of meetings I show up to with only a foggy notion of why I was included or what important context I need to be aware of before discussion.
klenwell 7y ago
A great former boss of mine and I adopted a silly catchphrase that was introduced to him by an efficiency guru at some managerial conference: "No agenda, no attend-ah." We groaned every time we used it. I've used it ever since.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Yeah I groaned too but it's a good quote. I'll use it too... The one I heard was "If we don't know what the meeting is for, how will we know what we're getting out of it if we attend?"
duxup 7y ago
I was at a company that employed thousands of people. They did a company wide training on effective meetings. Set agendas, notes, and etc were all part of their training. It was great. I never saw a single person do those things... not the VPs, not the CEO, nobody. I did it for my meetings as a sort of invisible act of defiance, but nobody ever read them before the meeting and most didn't know meeting invites came with anything other than the time, date, location info :(
- Timberwolf 7y ago
  > not the VPs, not the CEO This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be effective, short and have agendas... and usually you can count in hours the time before the one of the exact same senior managers has sent a 2 hour, 20-person invite titled "project catch up" with a blank body. (You can probably generalise this to many company initiatives, not just the ones about meeting habits.)
  - eitland 7y ago
    It feels like in almost every office kitchen I've been in in Norway there is some sort of label that say something that is supposed to be witty like: your mother does not work here, tidy up after yourself. It mostly doesn't work. Three places I worked had tidy kitchens. None of them had these labels, but more importantly: in all three of them management would fix it if others didn't. I guess most people only see their bosses boss tidy up a couple of times before they realize everyone is supposed to do that.
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      If my boss is too fancy to recook coffee so am I. Communal assets only work out if they are properly cared for by almost everyone except the usual antisocial free-riders who you have to ignore.
- progman32 7y ago
danielovichdk 7y ago
Absolutely. You can tell a lot about a person's professionalism by looking at their meeting invites. I avtively refuse meetings without an agenda and a why this meeting is important. And I put a Joy in applying this on a management level too. Don't fuck with people's time, it's the only thing we can't get back.
zip1234 7y ago
A counterpoint is that I've seen that people get appointed to handle those things and the recurring meeting happens but with additional overhead and people involved. Source: working in government
mcv 7y ago
I prefer meetings with just one clearly defined purpose that all participants agree is worth having a meeting for. Like "what are you currently working on?" (the daily stand-up), "what are we going to do this next sprint?" (the planning), "what is the best way to fix this problem we have?", "where do we want to be in 3 (or 6) months?". As soon as there's more than one point on te agenda, the meeting is going to be a drag for half the participants. (Of course that single purpose often still requires prep from the organiser and/or other participants.)
ska 7y ago
At one startup I was lucky/early enough to have the leverage to declare this as a policy (for me). If I didn't have minimally an agenda with a clear owner and at least one listed decision (or, rarely, a sensible request for inform only meeting) I wasn't going to attend. It got a bit of friction at first but increased the effectiveness of meetings by about 80% I think. It was nice while it lasted.
lilbobbytables 7y ago
Can you provide some examples? Need to push for changes like this myself.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  As a project manager who runs and attends a lot of meetings :) I recommend these two books about planning and running effective meetings: * "Effective Meeting Skills" by Marion Haynes is a short workbook from 1988. It looks dated, but the material is still relevant and a quick read. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/ * "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" by Steven Rogelberg. This 2019 book is great and includes useful findings from real studies of meetings. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/ This podcast interview with the author is a good introduction: https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-127-steven-rogelberg-on-making-meetings-great/ https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-127-steven-rogelberg-on-making...

Bartweiss 7y ago

Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting. We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's time (plus interrupt them). Adding an hour of prep and summary for the caller lowers that ratio a bit so everyone has a more similar view of the meeting. That's rarely grounds to make things harder with no benefit, but meeting prep has very solid benefits. Even in terms of time wasted, a clear agenda keeps meetings from dragging on, and routing minutes/summary after the fact avoids repeating discussions or inviting people who only need to listen.

papito 7y ago
Adding a barrier of entry to something generally improves the quality of whatever it is.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  At the cost of quantity, but agreed. (There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.) Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing. So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.
  - caro_douglos 7y ago
    might charging a ‘call to meeting’ fee based on the attendees salary/hourly rate be an alternative?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      I would be very concerned about that killing productivity by making it so that nobody is willing to schedule them at all.
    - triceratops 7y ago
      Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.
      - eitland 7y ago
        I'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it: Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.
        memling 7y ago
        in contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this. As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that. Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
naravara 7y ago
>We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  I can't believe I've never thought of it in physical terms before! This is perfect! I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way. At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake. Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
larrik 7y ago
I see it as putting more of the cost of the meeting onto the caller, rather than spreading it amongst the participants via wasted time and energy (or the dreaded re-convene since no one was ready).
- labawi 7y ago
  It's not just shifting costs. Maybe you trade say 1-3 units of time of caller for say 9x 1 units of time of attendees, for a 9/3 = 3x or more savings. Callers tend to have higher salary, but usually way less than the people count multiplier.

Tobani 7y ago

John Cleese taught us that in the 70's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetings,_Bloody_Meetings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetings,_Bloody_Meetings

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Back then information was disseminated via inter-office memos and meetings. They were more valuable for general communication than today.

earthboundkid 7y ago

Agreed but it also applies to standups. I think if you just want ambient awareness, have people post their daily "what I did/will do" to Slack. No need to derail every single day for half an hour or more.

na85 7y ago
I find 15-minute, daily "sync meetings" to be an invaluable tool in coordinating the efforts of an organization with many moving parts. The meeting chair (senior engineer) goes around the room and we all have the same list of items to report on each day. It helps avoid duplication of effort and also increases coordination in pursuit of objectives.
flatline 7y ago
Half an hour or more is no longer a standup.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup". More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.
  - username90 7y ago
    > standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes: > The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100 https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...

Jd 7y ago

Ever since I started ending time budgeting for each agenda item I've never looked back. My agendas look like this: (1) Two word emotional check in [Lead:Jd][budget: 5 minutes, actual: ] (2) How did sprint one go? [Lead:Mark][budget: 7 minutes, actual: ] (3) Should we have pizza or chinese food for lunch? [Lead:Francis][budget: 3 minutes, actual: ] I send out the agendas in advance for anyone to PM me to add something. Then I use a stop timer to track how many minutes were used per agenda and send it along with the minute meetings and action items post-meetings. Action items are almost always tracked some sort of issue tracker but I use different ones for different projects.

naravara 7y ago

Not just an agenda but, if possible, an explanation for why each invitee is being invited and what they are expected to bring to the table. I can't count the number of meetings I show up to with only a foggy notion of why I was included or what important context I need to be aware of before discussion.

klenwell 7y ago

A great former boss of mine and I adopted a silly catchphrase that was introduced to him by an efficiency guru at some managerial conference: "No agenda, no attend-ah." We groaned every time we used it. I've used it ever since.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
Yeah I groaned too but it's a good quote. I'll use it too... The one I heard was "If we don't know what the meeting is for, how will we know what we're getting out of it if we attend?"

duxup 7y ago

I was at a company that employed thousands of people. They did a company wide training on effective meetings. Set agendas, notes, and etc were all part of their training. It was great. I never saw a single person do those things... not the VPs, not the CEO, nobody. I did it for my meetings as a sort of invisible act of defiance, but nobody ever read them before the meeting and most didn't know meeting invites came with anything other than the time, date, location info :(

Timberwolf 7y ago
> not the VPs, not the CEO This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be effective, short and have agendas... and usually you can count in hours the time before the one of the exact same senior managers has sent a 2 hour, 20-person invite titled "project catch up" with a blank body. (You can probably generalise this to many company initiatives, not just the ones about meeting habits.)
- eitland 7y ago
  It feels like in almost every office kitchen I've been in in Norway there is some sort of label that say something that is supposed to be witty like: your mother does not work here, tidy up after yourself. It mostly doesn't work. Three places I worked had tidy kitchens. None of them had these labels, but more importantly: in all three of them management would fix it if others didn't. I guess most people only see their bosses boss tidy up a couple of times before they realize everyone is supposed to do that.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    If my boss is too fancy to recook coffee so am I. Communal assets only work out if they are properly cared for by almost everyone except the usual antisocial free-riders who you have to ignore.
progman32 7y ago

danielovichdk 7y ago

Absolutely. You can tell a lot about a person's professionalism by looking at their meeting invites. I avtively refuse meetings without an agenda and a why this meeting is important. And I put a Joy in applying this on a management level too. Don't fuck with people's time, it's the only thing we can't get back.

zip1234 7y ago

A counterpoint is that I've seen that people get appointed to handle those things and the recurring meeting happens but with additional overhead and people involved. Source: working in government

mcv 7y ago

I prefer meetings with just one clearly defined purpose that all participants agree is worth having a meeting for. Like "what are you currently working on?" (the daily stand-up), "what are we going to do this next sprint?" (the planning), "what is the best way to fix this problem we have?", "where do we want to be in 3 (or 6) months?". As soon as there's more than one point on te agenda, the meeting is going to be a drag for half the participants. (Of course that single purpose often still requires prep from the organiser and/or other participants.)

ska 7y ago

At one startup I was lucky/early enough to have the leverage to declare this as a policy (for me). If I didn't have minimally an agenda with a clear owner and at least one listed decision (or, rarely, a sensible request for inform only meeting) I wasn't going to attend. It got a bit of friction at first but increased the effectiveness of meetings by about 80% I think. It was nice while it lasted.

lilbobbytables 7y ago

Can you provide some examples? Need to push for changes like this myself.

cpeterso 7y ago
As a project manager who runs and attends a lot of meetings :) I recommend these two books about planning and running effective meetings: * "Effective Meeting Skills" by Marion Haynes is a short workbook from 1988. It looks dated, but the material is still relevant and a quick read. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/ * "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" by Steven Rogelberg. This 2019 book is great and includes useful findings from real studies of meetings. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/ This podcast interview with the author is a good introduction: https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-127-steven-rogelberg-on-making-meetings-great/ https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-127-steven-rogelberg-on-making...